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[molenick]

I am hesitant to post another long, rambling post, but when the Paige question came up earlier, I did some research on Baseball Reference for other Negro League pitchers.

Three of them (Ray Brown, Bill Foster, and Bullet Rogan) are close to Paige in innings pitched, seem to have more impressive numbers in many of the traditional stats, and top him in WAR7 and WAR/162. In particular, Bill Foster and Bullet Rogan* are ranked as the second and third best pitchers in WAR/162 (behind another Negro Leaguer Dave Brown, but he only pitched half as many innings as the other players mentioned). Ray Brown is 21st in WAR/162 and Paige 38th. Rogan is 39th in WAR7, Foster 141st, Brown 224th, Paige 294th. There are other Negro Leaguers that rank highly in these categories, but they do not have as many innings or, if they do, the rest of their stats were not as impressive as these four.

One caveat is that I can't figure out Paige's WAR/162 just for the Negro Leagues. But that wouldn’t change his WAR7, since his seven best years were in the Negro Leagues. Plus, now that they are all considered major leagues, I am not sure if a differentiation is needed.

Two arguments for Paige are strikeouts and that he pitched well when he was older. And it's true, his strikeouts totals and ratios are better than the other three pitchers. But we know from Nolan Ryan that strikeouts and longevity don’t necessarily make you the greatest pitcher (although Paige had much better control than Ryan).

Here is a mix of traditional and analytic stats:
Bill Foster 110-56 2.63 1.172 47.1 WAR in 1499.67 IP (31.8 IP per WAR)
Bullet Rogan 120-52 2.65 1.157 61.5 WAR* in 1500 IP (24.4 IP per WAR; but 39.7 using just his pitching WAR of 37.8)
Ray Brown 122-45 3.02 1.205 39.5 WAR in 1477 IP (37.4)
Satchel Paige 118-80 2.70 1.092 46.3 WAR in 1695 IP (36.6)

Looking at this, it may be that Paige was the best, but it's not a no-brainer. If we start with the assumption that "of course he was the best because that's what I've always heard" then there is a tendency to find arguments that support that and ignore contradictory evidence. But if we started from scratch and were not aware of the legend of Satchel Paige, and used statistics now available to us that weren't before, we might come up with a different answer. I'm not saying he was a bum…just that maybe, possibly, who knows, he was perhaps the second or third best Negro League pitcher based on the numbers available now (which may change as more research is done). And to be honest, I feel weird saying that because for the last 50 years I just assumed he was the best.

Anyway, at least I learned something about players that I was not familiar with (other than their names). I also recognize Smokey Joe Williams as a candidate for best Negro League pitcher but his best years came before Baseball Reference has stats. Other names I see mentioned in these discussions, such as Leon Day, Martin Dihigo, and Hilton Smith also do not have enough data in BR for a statistical comparison.

And I nominate Bullet Rogan as candidate for best two-way player: 120-52 .698 2.65 pitching; .338/.413./.521/.934 batting (mostly as an outfielder in the same years he was pitching).

* Rogan's WAR rankings are skewed because they include his batting. But he was still a helluva pitcher.